Here is a simple question with an obvious answer: Is President Barack Obama more deferential to the religious sensibilities of Afghan Muslims or the religious freedom of American Catholics?

The answer: Obama is more deferential to the religious sensibilities of Muslims in Afghanistan than to the religious freedom of Catholics in the United States.

Let’s stipulate a point of principle out front: People should not burn Korans, period. To burn a Koran, whether as a premeditated act of spite or as a boneheaded mistake, is wrong.

That being said, the Korans burned at Bagram Air Force in Afghanistan were burned as the result of a boneheaded mistake--not as a conscious effort to affront Muslims.

Here in the United States, President Obama’s decision to order Roman Catholics to act against the teachings of their faith by forcing Catholics to buy insurance that pays for sterilizations, artificial contraceptives and abortifacients was not made by mistake. Obama did it with long and careful premeditation--fully understanding that the Catholic Church would (correctly) perceive the regulation as a very serious and direct attack on the free exercise of religion by Catholics.

We know this because from August to February, the Catholic bishops of the United States repeatedly warned the Obama administration directly and through public statements that the administration's sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate was an attack on the religious liberty of Catholics and that Catholics would adamantly oppose it as an attack on their religious liberty.